I’m not sure I’ve ever posted about this, but grew up in Greenwich Village in NYC. While all of my family still lives in the city, I’ve been on the west coast for the last ten years or so and I’m kind of tired of it. I miss my family and I miss the city, so I’ve decided to move back, which I’ll be doing in the middle of September. For the next two weeks I’m going to be in NYC on a combination vacation/apartment hunting trip and I’m probably not going to have a chance to post as much as I usually do.  So if the posting seems a little sporadic and light over the next few weeks, now you know why.

If anybody is interested in doing some guest posts while I’m out of town,  send me an email. I’d love to see other people get more involved in the site.

If you live in the New York area and happen to know of any good apartments that are available , or just want to meet up for a drink or something, please drop me a line.

Now all I have to do is figure out the best way to pack and move a few thousand magazines without totally destroying both the magazines them selves and the considerable effort I’ve put into organizing them.

I upgraded the blog to Wordpress 2.6 this weekend and everything seemed to go fine. Until this morning I got an email from a reader letting me know that the rss feed was broken. (thanks Rutger!) Really broken. As in PHP was dying in the middle of generating it. And Feed Burner was flipping out.

After a few false starts I tracked it down to a plugin that just doesn’t seem like the new WP version. It’s alright, I don’t use that plugin for much anyway.

The feed is now working again. However, the items in the feed do not currently have the date appended to the end of the title. e.g.: (Mar, 1922). This is because I accomplished that in my template by just adding the code to print the date right after the title in the template. Of course, taking this approach means I also had to add it to all of the pages that generate feeds (rss, rdf, atom, rss2). This means I also have to update those pages every time I upgrade wordpress. This time I forgot. I’m going to try to find a better way to hook the tile and append the date before the page gets rendered. So, hopefully, the dates on rss feeds should be back in the next day or so.

If any of our readers know a good way to modify the title of a post right before it’s rendered and wants to spare me a few hours of wading through the codex, I’d appreciate it. I don’t want to append the date to the post title then save it to the database. The date is contained in a custom field and I’d like to keep the two separate.

If you’re skilled in css and html please do me a favor and look at the css file for this site. Then look at the source of this page.

Did you have to fight the urge to cry, throw up or punch something? Do you feel sullied? If so you’re just the person I’m looking for. While I can be completely OCD about scanning, straightening, OCRing images and whatnot, css just drives me mad. I’m awful at it and it makes my brain hurt. The template of this site is basically a mashup of an older template and a newer design, retrofitted to work on the YUI-Grid framework and hacked on by your’s truly until it seemed to look decent for most of the people, most of the time. It looks alright, but under the covers it’s a complete mess.

Lately this has become a problem because I’ve been wanting to add some new features to the site via some wordpress plugins. However, they all seem to expect some sort of rational styles, and thus look completely messed up when I try them out.

I’m looking for someone to help me clean up and recode the css and some of the html on the site. You don’t need to redesign anything, though if you want to, I’d certainly be open to it.

I’ll be happy to give you a big plug, and permanent credit on the site, which actually has a surprisingly decent amount of traffic. I can even pay you in either a moderate amount of cold, hard cash, or a large quantity of old magazines (I have lots of duplicates), or some mix of the two.

If you’re interested, please email me, or leave a comment on this post.

By the way, if anyone is interested in the features I’m planning on adding, here’s my list, everyone please let me know which of these you’d like most, and any others you think I should add:

• Better comments system possibly coComment, or Intense Debate but at least something that allows users to edit their comments, use gravatars, have profiles and has better threading and spam control.
• Post view counts, ratings, favorites, etc so you can get lists of the most popular posts
• Forums, for discussions that don’t regard a specific post
• User contributed content, either through custom software, image galleries, or the forums. Not sure which.
• Better ways to navigate and explore the content on this site. This one is all me, but it would be a lot easier with a decent template to work with. I want to add browsing by year, topic, article length, etc.
• User tagging. I’ve started tagging some posts as you’ve probably noticed, but there are another three or four thousand that are untagged and that I’ll never get the time to do myself. It would be nice if users could help contribute to this process. Actually, this I could probably do now, so if any of my regular readers would like to help, drop me a line.

Ok, so here’s my question. Is this some weird new kind of spam, or are teenage school girls in Australia actually using my site as a chat room to get around a firewall?

I’m going up to the bay area this weekend to attend Maker Faire. I went last year and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It was one of the best events I’ve ever been to. If you’re in the area, do your self a favor and check it out.

If any of you are going to be at the faire and would like to meet up, just drop me an email, or comment on this post.

I was looking at my site stats this morning and I noticed that something like 5,000 people viewed this page and that all of them were coming from search engines after having searched for “Divorce Ring” or “Divorce Rings“, making them the #1 and #2 search terms on my site by a big margin. So I checked out the search myself and it turns out that this weekend Dear Abby wrote a column about, you guessed it, divorce rings. I think this is the first time I’ve actually seen a big traffic surge to a page that is not actually linked to by another site. Abby must have a hell of a big readership for that many people to search then click through to my site.

Sorry everyone, the site has been down since about 3 am PST. I’m not exactly sure what happened. Something in the database was corrupted and I had to restore from yesterdays back up. I’m going to try to restore todays posts as soon as possible.

-Charlie

If any of you readers out there are experienced sysadmin/webmaster types I could use a little help. Every time this site gets on the front page of Digg or Slashdot it has the tendency to go down, or at least go very slow. I’m running wp-super cache and I have a dedicated server, but there are a lot of images on the site (we serve about 700gigs a month), and everyone of them has to spin up a 24 meg apache process. I would like to set up a caching proxy using either squid or varnish to handle all of the static content. However my site has a pretty odd vhosts setup generated by the control panel software my host uses and I’m not really sure what i need to do.

So how about it, anyone out there who would be willing and able to help me get it set up?

Welcome to the new Modern Mechanix! This is our first site redesign in… well actually it’s our first redesign period. I want to give a huge thanks to my sister Tamara for coming up with the look and feel as well as that spiffy new logo. I think she did a great job of keeping the things that worked from the old design and fixing most of it’s shortcomings.

The changes are not just cosmetic though. I’ve added a few new features to the site. First off, for our regular commenters, there is now a comments RSS feed. Actually the site always had one, but it was pretty well hidden. You can also now subscribe to get email notifications when anybody replies to one of your comments so you don’t have to keep checking all the posts for new responses.

You can now browse the archives by magazine and issue. Just click on the cover gallery link to start. You can also click on the magazine name in any post to see a listing of all of the issues (eg: Modern Mechanix), or if you want to see other articles posted from the same issue, you can click on the issue date (eg: 11-1932).

I’m in the process of moving the categories into a hierarchy, so for example, the Transportation category will now contain the Automotive, Aviation, and Nautical categories. This will let me add a bunch of new, more specific categories without taking up the whole left side of the screen.

I also added a little Amazon store where you can subscribe to science magazines as well as see (or if you’re so inclined, buy) books that I like. Tamara and I are also working on designs for some nifty new Modern Mechanix gear which I think you’ll all really like. If you haven’t been to her store yet, check it out, she makes great stuff.

From a tech perspective, I redid the entire site HTML and CSS using Yahoo’s awesome UI framework, if you do much web design I highly recommend it. This should fix most of the problems people were having with the site looking screwed up at smaller resolutions, particularly in IE.

That’s all for now, but in the coming weeks and months you can expect a bunch of new stuff. Now that I’ve got the back end cleaned up it’s a lot easer for me to make changes and implement features.

Please let me know what you think of the new design and tell me if anything isn’t working right for you. Also, I’d like to know what new features you’d like from the site. I’m sure you all have a lot of great ideas.

I would like to give a big shout out to my co-conspirator, Simone, for all of her hard work on the site. I couldn’t do it without her.

Lastly, I want to thank all of our commenters. This site would be no fun without you.